Table of contents for Spring 2023 in Orion

IN MY ADULT LIFE, I’ve had just one occasion on which to draw from six years of Spanish language instruction, in late 2015 when my father and I stayed for a week in Murcia. We’d been invited there to teach English by day; by night he’d sleep, and I’d try to sleep, only to wake up at twelve or one with no better plan than to put on my sneakers and roam the city streets. I drifted between cafés in the dark that week, encountering several times the same ghostly bunch of Swedish travelers who lamented to me in perfect English how this was the only place where they felt alive. At one café, news broke of an attack in Paris, and I pulled from the depths what little vocabulary…

In the breaking apart of the universe that we are undergoing, oh marvel! The falling pieces are alive.—René Char, “The Companions in the Garden” (1956), translated by Mary Ann Caws (2008) Facing uncertainty “OUR EYES ALONE can still cry out,” wrote René Char during World War II. Three-quarters of a century later, how can we not be moved by the compass of that catastrophe and, like Char, decide for the moment to stop publishing, to not burden our fellows with word arrangements when action must take the lead? What should we make of this paralyzing bewilderment that obliges us to fall dumb, no longer knowing what to say or how to say it, and unable to settle on any stable model with which to face the worldwide and all-encompassing uncertainty…

I took to the English language as a duck takes to water. I was therefore a keen accomplice and student in my own mental colonization.—Dambudzo Marechera The Mirrored Building, Part One THE BIRD THOUGHT to find its way, realizing too late that a mirror had replaced the sky. L. Freycinet, In a Series of Letters to a Friend (1817), or Eagerness At length: the Marianne Islands. Here original habits minglewith the austere, superstitious manners of Spaniards. The bot-tom is good, the anchorage safe. Our minds, greedy of pleasure,make us eager. Rich countries we quitted make us eager.* Fault Line The Northern Mariana Islands lie in a crescent moon south-southeast of Japan. At the lower point is Guåhan, also known as Guam, an island that is geologically part of the same…

UNTIL THE LATE nineteenth century, lichens were understood as individual organisms. It was then suggested, controversially, that a lichen was, in fact, a partnership. The division between the partners might have been invisible at first, but underneath a microscope, it was plain as day: a lichen was a pact between a fungus and an alga. Scientists began to speak of symbiosis: not survival of the fittest, but cooperation, reciprocity, partnership. In 2016, it was found that in addition to the fungal and the algal partners, a yeast made the duo a trio. Or maybe more: some lichens also seemed to incorporate bacteria, viruses, amoebas, even other microfungi and microalgae. It was a collective whose very inter-activity enabled it to survive conditions that the individual organisms within could never survive on…

My obsession with pineapples nearly drove me mad. I dreamt of the days when I would be grown and able to buy a whole carton for myself alone.—Maya Angelou SPRING BRINGS the boom-burst of new life, of pineapples and hummingbirds all over the world. On the island of Oahu, red cayenne pineapples ripen to reveal their signature golden flesh, and sugarloaf pineapples glow pale, almost white when they are ready to pick. Hummingbirds show up in every state in America except Hawaii—their tiny wings can’t make the long distance to the archipelago and survive strong oceanic winds. But even if they could survive the long flight across the ocean, hummingbirds are officially forbidden as imports into the state because they pollinate pineapples, which render the fruit less marketable as the…

Patiq Pulaumaruņa Agnoyuk. Piņigiiga.Niġiksranik payukia Agnoyuk.Kavusruņa. Puġiktuq. Piņilsraiga. Tununami naun, tiņmiaqłania.vaura.tuq? Inipika.tuq. Kaņņigiga:Pitaialaq. Sutailaq.Nunataitmiuq uvva. Atagumuq imma: kigrawik, kayuqtuq, nunivaaksrat,pamiuqtaq, paułuk, piġaluyak,aliugġaq, quzimaq, piknik, mazu, kavlaq, aukpalitiņiq,suġat, suak, milugataq,kimagluk, quņuliq, paitqsinaaq:: quvliliruņa: izauġaitka, uyayula. Marrow I am visiting Agnoyuk. I fear for her safety.To Agnoyuk I brought nourishment.I traveled through a wave in rough seas. She is trenchant. I fear for her. Remember how there used to be many birds at the back of the island? There is an image that has been reflected. I reached the end of it, my limit,my destination:all is depleted. There is nothing left.No land to be seen anywhere. Listen to that distant sound: peregrine falcon, red fox, berries and greens growing to profusion from theprofuse earth,fireweed, cormorant, compressed freshwater ice which is blue in…

Gigii-aadawaa’awimin zagapizoyangWe have gone sailing untethereddibishkoo anangoog agoozowaad giizhigonglike stars hung in the skyishkwaa Naagaanizid-anang miinawaa Waaban-anangafter Mercury and Venusjibwaa Miskwaa-anang miinawaa Zhaawan-anangbefore Mars and Jupitergagweji-minjimendamangtrying to rememberizhi’omagag gashkiiwegibagiiwinthe shape of the cocooninigokwaag asabthe size of the netezhi-madwesing debweyangthe sound of our own truthganabaj aabiding miinawaawhich might once againaabitoojiinidizoyang omaahold us in place.Nimbiinda’azomin.We are caught.Nimbiinda’azhaanaanig.We catch.NimbiindaakoojigeminWe become eternity.Nimbiindaanikaanesemin.We are within. Margaret O’Donnell Noodin is professor of English and associate dean of the humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She is the author of Bawaajimo: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature and two collections of poetry in Anishinaabemowin and English, Weweni and What the Chickadee Knows. To hear her work, visit ojibwe.net.…

sino ang bahalasa buhay natin dear winged fruitwe collect your light iyong mga dasalat aking mga tula dandelions, driftinginto riverbed silt ganito ba ang diwaisang kisap-mata dear vitreous rosemoon-filtered lilac isipan, katawansino ang may ari carry your dreamingdaughters, tumbling gaano kalalimgaano kabigat into bleached bonesinto bluegreen salt *These are Tagalog/English, though each is not a translation of the other. Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of seven books of poetry and essays, including Letters to a Young Brown Girl and Invocation to Daughters. She teaches in the Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program at University of San Francisco.…

Send the mermaid to the mountainwas the idea.I’d received in the mailunexpectedly a translation of Dögen’s sutraon mountains walking.I sit down to draw a mountain.It comes out a mermaid. “If mountains walk, so can I!”the mermaid cries bravelyand she’s already off, swimming backwards.“Mountains travel on water,” Dögen says.The mermaid’s called Reilly.On the day she eventually climbs ashorefrom the restless, relentless, unwearying,brooding, heedless, bitter, ceremonial, dark blue sea,the winds are blazing like a navy.She joins a boxing gym.At her first boxing lesson she looks down to seeknees!decanting themselvesfrom her lower self. “I don’t always have knees,”she says to Virgil,her sparring partner.“Good enough,” says Virgil. He goes on tying her glove.Like birds in flightmermaids overcome dragby producing thrust— all the muscles of the torso undulatein a single wave from head to toe.“You…

IF A PARENT WORRIES for their child, what do the childless worry about? This is not a question that has been put to me yet, but it is one that I have imagined a few times. Every time you hear of a plane crash, you think of your own child. You are grateful that they were not on that plane. I read these words in Reader’s Digest when I was in middle school, when I couldn’t have known what it meant to be either—parent or child. A life with my parents, and later with friends and acquaintances, produced this shorthand: a parent was someone who worried for their children, the worries changing contours at different stages of life. But none of this might have come to me had I not…

IT BEGINS with a very old story, reaching back to the great living beings who dominated the landscape of North America until the time that humans arrived. Or, rather, it’s about the stories that swirl around the remains of those fauna. Across the Americas, early humans moved in as the Ice Age moved out, living briefly with the giants of the late Pleistocene. Great mammoths and mastodons, beavers as big as black bears, bison with horns as wide across as a man is tall. The stories are that those early people and their sharpened Clovis points led to the animals’ mass extinction. Or it was climate upheaval. Or the Thunder Beings restored order after the monsters became too ravenous. All we know for certain is that they were once there,…

AS IT HAPPENS, I am currently preoccupied with rivers, with the night, and with walking, and often find myself at the overlap of all three. At my latitude, winter days are all the obvious things—very long, very dark, often frozen, unforgiving—but I’ve nevertheless been walking toward or along the river. Certainly a strange craving that perhaps, and simply, stems from too many hours curled over the desk. This craving has led me in the cold-fingered months to certain books, and to certain thoughts while reading those books, and to a selection of things and places, and to people who have spent winter feeling even colder than I have, in lands so desolate I can’t even dream them. Some words within the Sámi languages, like njoammil (hare) and njuolla (arrow), can…

• A subscription to the magazine (for as long as your pledge is received) • An exclusive first look at new issue covers* • Early access to a featured article in the upcoming issue* Plus, you’ll experience the joy of knowing your monthly contribution directly supports the work Orion does to uplift writers from around the globe. Every donation helps Orion bring you stories that connect you with others in a seemingly fractured world. orionmagazine.org/sustain *requires subscription to Orion’s free e-newsletter…

LANKY VERREAUX’S SIFAKAS (Propithecus verreauxi verreauxi) bounce through the forests of southwestern Madagascar, ghostly white blurs leaping between branches. Nearby, their smaller amber-eyed cousins, red-fronted lemurs (Eulemur fulvus rufus), creep around the canopy, munching leaves in the moonlight. The maintenance of their daily lives, like that of all prey animals, requires a particular calculus: How can I eat but avoid getting eaten? Entire species develop traits and nurture behaviors in this pursuit, employing all sorts of dramatic flourishes, from camouflage and mimicry to growing defensive spikes and spines to theatrical thanatosis, or playing dead. Social animals often use alarm calls to signal an approaching threat, and some primates have perfected this down to differentiating between terrestrial and airborne predators. Heads up, a sifaka might call to her clan, Here comes…

Gaadin Ah waan fuh know dem.Ah waan fuh know how we fuh sinen dat fiel’. Dey eye clean luk a hunded shell wid de snail outta dem.We been good ta de doe? Luk ah pay mind ta de wind,how we fuh mek ting good? Dey been good ta de land dey say dey own?Mah dead’s daak body ta shine an dey ’lone. How dey fuh keep ta doe off?Dey fingers dutty by middle ob de day,dey body en yestiddy cloes. Ah waan fuh know how dey fuh walkta de poch fo dayclean. Garden I want to know them.I want to know the nature of our sinsin that field. Their eyes empty as a hundred snail shells.Were they kind to the doe? As if listening to the wind for the day’s…

Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer Milkweed Editions IN BRAIDING SWEETGRASS, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be human.” As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the idea that plants and animals are our teachers, providers, relations, and companions. Yet how can we consider the personhood of life-forms that we refer to as inanimate? Her intervention is to propose a new pronoun, ki, from the Anishinaabe word bmaadiziaki for “Earth-being,” that allows us to speak of the living world from a place of humility, wonder, and respect. The plural would be kin. Kimmerer shows us that awakening of ecological consciousness requires the knowledge and practice of a…

SOMEONE I LOVED once told me that the pigeons were the best part of Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring. He pronounced it, in that gentle way of his, to be a perfect film, which it was; I had long known as much. The story is about an absent-minded professor who relies on the care of his daughter, Noriko. They are close, comfortable, and happy together until her aunt brings up that it is high time that Noriko gets married. Noriko resists; she wants to remain with her father. Finally, to convince her to leave, the father tells the “only and greatest lie” he has ever told: that he plans to remarry, and will no longer need his daughter. In the next scene, the aunt and father walk to a nearby shrine,…

IN JUNE 2022, Artangel’s installation A Thousand Words for Weather opened at London’s Senate House Library. Created by author Jessica J. Lee and sound artist Claudia Molitor, the piece invites listeners to consider the ways in which our experiences of weather—and climate change—are at once intimate, shared, yet untranslatable. Lee began by working with a group of UK–based poets and translators in English, Mandarin, Bengali, Urdu, German, Turkish, French, Spanish, Polish, and Arabic, each of whom contributed ten weather words and their definitions. Each word was then translated into the other languages, forming a thousand-word “dictionary” of the weather. Molitor then translated this dictionary into a sonic landscape, whose playback is controlled by real-time weather data from the UK Metropolitan Office. The installation is housed over three floors of the…